Saints Like Me

My book about Saint Clare of Assisi was just released. (Insert the sound of whistles and bells.) It is the second book I’ve published in my later writing life about a saint, the first being a biography of St. Francis of Assisi. Since I am a Protestant and have written most of my books and articles to that audience and from that purview, many people I tell about the subject of my new book respond with a blank stare. I ask, “Have you heard of Clare of Assisi?” and the answer is pretty consistently, “no.” Those who do know of St. Clare respond with a different kind of quizzical look: Are you Catholic?

No, I am not Catholic. Nevertheless, my inner life has been profoundly affected and even transformed by an earnest interest in and exploration of the saints. So, on the occasion of the release of my book, I will be writing a series of short pieces exploring how I, as a Protestant, came to love the saints. I’ll further make the case as to why I believe all nonCatholic religious people ought to take the time to probe the depths of their spiritual vision and learn from them.

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I grew up in the Protestant tradition and my faith came alive when I was a teenager through the evangelical impulse known as “the Jesus Movement.” (I was a “Jesus Freak.”) I carried this idealism for a very long time, into college, to the extent that my husband and I made the decision to go to seminary to become professional ministers.

My husband became a pastor and, for a short while, I was one too — we co-pastored. However, after a few years, I felt a different calling — the calling to be a writer. I started writing articles for a local newspaper and that continued to grow to the extent that over a few years, I was picked up by Time magazine and served as their stringer when we were living in Honduras. Then when we moved back to the States I was hired by the national Christian magazine, Christianity Today where I worked for several years as an editor and then also as a writer. I was one of their main feature writers during my period there and wrote many cover stories for them, including about Fred Rogers, James Dobson, and Charles Colson — to name a few. I covered the whole gamut of ministry and thought leaders within the evangelical tradition.

The saddest part of my story is that my marriage ended in divorce. There were a lot of reasons for that, but one of the most painful and life-altering for me was the role of the church. When I asked for the church’s help as my marriage was collapsing, they did not help me. The result was I lost my marriage. That was very disaffecting for me and as a result, for a long time after that, I left the church, at least in my heart. I attended a few churches here and there and when I lived in Italy I attended a small Anglican church, which I really enjoyed. But in terms of the apparatus of evangelical worship, I did not want to be part of a church. I thought it was fake. And having been married to a pastor for a very long time and having been a pastor’s wife, I understood the nuances (and also the duplicity) that can attend a life in ministry, and felt I had ground to stand upon to conclude that. I wasn’t simply one of those haters who finds any reason they can to leave the church.

During the rehabilitation of my spiritual life, I was on a walking tour in Italy with my sister shortly after my divorce when an inexplicable awakening happened for me in Assisi through the person of Saint Francis. Francis told his followers: “We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.” This sentiment captures what I experienced when visiting Assisi that time so long ago.

Saint Francis was a huge part of my spiritual rehabilitation and that is why I’m a proponent for the importance of knowing the saints. The Protestant and Evangelical traditions have sadly neglected this aspect of our Christian identity and their part in the church universal. These are heroic Christians who we ought to know and from whom we ought to draw consolation because they are people who suffered. And though they lived on a heroic level, they were very much real human beings. Their real lives intersected the brokenness of the world and their stories render to the fellow pilgrims bits of light as to how they navigated real life amid the world’s brokenness and how they endured suffering because of it and still saw God’s beauty through all of it.

Sometimes, when I read the Bible, it feels so familiar I can’t hear it anymore; it is not touching me or moving me. But when I look at the life a saint, I see a testimony of one who has contended with the same Bible in collision with the same broken world and who forged a path through. That helps me.

I don’t presume to possess the levels of heroism so many saints embodied (though they would deem themselves greatest among sinners). I do, however, live as they did, on that thin line between the world of Christ-belief and the world of brokenness. And in its own unique way, my life translates, as only my life can, what one life looks like that has been part of this collision of worlds and has survived it. Chances are, your life too, is on that same thin line and your life is translating your way of surviving the collision, as only your life can.

So we are all saints together, saints like Francis of Assisi and St. Clare; saints like you and like me.

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